S3stat, Twiddla, Unwaffle, the Expat site, and a dozen other old projects all still run on a single box in a Colo. it costs about $800/month for the half cage

S3stat, Twiddla, Unwaffle, the Expat site, and a dozen other old projects all still run on a single box in a Colo. it costs about $800/month for the half cage and all the hardware in it, when you amortise it out. And there's plenty of performance overhead for when one project gets a lot of attention or I want to ad something new. Pretty much the only thing I use cloud computing for is the nightly job for S3stat, because it fits the workload pattern that EC2 was designed for. Namely, it needs to run 70 odd hours of computing every day, and gets 3 hours to do it in. For SaaS sized web stuff, self hosting still makes the most sense.